Shocker! ‘Scary Movie 5’ is awful

I enjoy RottenTomatoes.com as much as the next movie guy, but the folks who run the film-criticism-collecting website really, really need to come up with a protest mechanism.

Look at it this way — if a TV viewer can cause Tiger Woods to be assessed a two-stroke penalty at the Masters, a guy like me who reads tons of movie reviews every week should be able to file a protest challenging a “Fresh” designation given to a supposedly borderline review.

With such a mechanism place, “Scary Movie 5” could have a perfect game in progress; i.e. a score of zero. Instead, the latest installment in the horror-spoof franchise has a 5 thanks to two dubious “Fresh” reviews from a couple of online critics.

See if these sound like ringing endorsements to you:

1. “There are opportunities to have a good time with this film if you are a forgiving sort,” wrote Jordan Hoffman of ScreenCrush.

2. “If AIRPLANE! was Mad Magazine at its absolute best, a real genius work of insanity, SCARY MOVIE V is an issue you don’t bother trying to get back after the teacher confiscates it.” That’s from Devin Faraci of BadassDigest.

And those are the two Fresh reviews of the 38 collected so far. Really? You call that Fresh? Damning with faint praise (i.e., “It may be a steaming dog turd, but it’s not bad as steaming dog turds go”) ought to be an open-and-shut case for Rotten.

The 11 Top Critics who bothered to check out the movie after it opened Friday — it wasn’t screened in advance; now we know why — disliked the movie, which is no surprise. But sometimes these folks give at least backhanded compliments to the lowbrow stuff, like “it has a few scattered laughs” or “you could do worse, like go see a Nicolas Cage movie.” After all, they did like the “Piranha” remake (the first one, not 3 “Double-D”).

But not “Scary Movie 5. ” The comments included “painfully unfunny,” ‘numbingly inane” and “a hate crime against cinema.” And then there was Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who went to imaginative lengths to capture the depths of his loathing:

“Put it this way: There’s a spoof of ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ in which gorillas throw their feces at the wall to see if it sticks, and you can’t help wondering if this is actual documentary footage of the script meetings.”